On Not Being Silent in the Darkness: Adorno's Singular Apophaticism

To the isolated, isolation seems an indubitable certainty; they are bewitched on pain of losing their existence, not to perceive how mediated their isolation is'-Adorno-Theodor Adorno was one of the great intellectual figures of the twentieth century. Negative Dialectics is his major and culminating work. In it he attempts to free critical thought from the blinding orthodoxies of late capitalism, and earlier ages too. The book is essential reading for students of Adorno. It is also a vital weapon for making sense of modern times. ISBN 0-203-47960-2 Master e-book ISBN ISBN 0-203-47991-2 (Adobe eReader Format) ISBN 0-415-05221-1 (Print Edition)

Journal of Classical Sociology, 2012

Adorno's social theory dissolves the dogmatic posture of reified things. Its critical intention is to decipher the human social practice hidden in things. For Adorno, the social practice that counts is the one that fights barbarism, and for this fight to succeed, it has to tackle the social preconditions that make barbarism possible. A social practice that fails to do just that partakes in the false world of bourgeois society that it ostensibly seeks to overcome. In this context, Adorno argues, on the one hand, that the fight against barbarism is impossible because every social practice is the same. On the other, he says that negation is the only alternative to the falsehood of bourgeois society. The essay explores Adorno's Negative Dialectics to examine this paradox and to decipher its conception of social practice in a reified world. What does it mean to say 'no'?

New Formations, 2005

2021

Appearing in: The Meaning and Power of Negativity. Series: Religion in Philosophy and Theology. Claremont Studies in the Philosophy of Religion. Ed. Ingolf U. Dalferth, Marlene A. Block. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck. 2021.

Marx and Philosphy Review of Books, 2019

Review of Eric Oberle's book 'Adorno and the Century of Negative Identity', Stanford University Press, 2019.

A Companion To Adorno (ed. Peter Gordon and Espen Hammer), 2020

Adorno, like Hegel and Kant, addressed himself to the limits of thought, the bounds beyond which we cannot go since to go beyond them is to stop making sense at all. However, Adorno also thought, following a line of thought that flowers in Hegel and Marx, that what seem to be limits of thought can turn out in historical circumstances merely to be limitations that can be overcome with changed social and political circumstances. This is the core of Adorno’s theory of “non-identity.” This in turn requires him as he recognizes to take on all the Hegelian criticisms of such a view and to show how the negative dialectic not only escapes them but offers a new paradigm of dialectical thought.

It is generally recognized that Adorno and Levinas should both be read as urging a rethinking of ethics in light of Auschwitz. This demand should be understood in terms of the acknowledgement of transcendence. A phenomenological account of the event of Auschwitz developed by Todes motivates my use of Cavell’s distinction between acknowledgement and knowledge. Both Levinas and Adorno argue that an ethically adequate acknowledgement of transcendence requires that the traditional concept of transcendence as represented in theodicy must be rejected. This rejection takes the form of a rejection of theodicy (Levinas) and a negative theodicy (Adorno). I argue that Adorno’s response is superior because it is a response to the specificity and particularity of the event of Auschwitz as the destruction of, rather than merely the denial of, the humanity of both perpetrators and victims.

In this essay I examine Adorno's purported "pessimism," (according to Habermas and Honneth) and propose that in spite of such an apparent stance, particular uses of language allow for effective political resistance. Seminar paper written Spring 2004 @ JHU Humanities Center

The primary concern of the present paper is to answer the question, ‘What is the relation between non-identity and truth in Adorno’s Negative Dialectics?’ It employs Adorno’s articulation of the ‘outside’ of philosophy (á la Aristotle’s first matter), which underpins the need for conceptual constellations if we are to mimetically examine the non-conceptual thing. Following this a further question presents itself: how do these engagements inflict a critical mark on the Hegelian method of totalization – the dialectic of truth? The essay ends with an analysis of two films, Metropolis and Primal Fear, aimed at separating out Hegelian conceptions of truth from Adornian unresolved truth; the former aimed at a universal, the latter indicative of a non-identical aporia. We must conclude with the possibility that to leave the unresolved nature of non-identity unresolved for truth is the ontological challenge par excellence that presented itself to Adorno’s negative dialectics as it presents itself to post-Kantian continental philosophy today.

This paper proposes to establish synthetically how the Merleau-Ponty’s proposal in Phenomenology of Perception and the Adorno’s proposal in Negative Dialectics are closely related and even complementary, specifically regarding to what would be the phenomenological foundations that stand in the adornian negative dialectic that questions the main way of philosophy to proceed. This questioning will help us to understand a metaphilosophy with practical scopes. Themes such as corporality and the critic to the modern rationality stuck in the preeminence of subjective transcendental conscience are common and complementary aspects which will help us to understand the limits of a discursive and unilateral way of thinking. Finally, but not less important, this paper will help to set the basis on how the dialectical movement and the phenomenological approaches, considering Adorno’s and Merleau-Ponty’s proposals, could influence on the contemporary notion of moral reflection and action.

2017

WE founded the Association for Adorno Studies in December of 2011 with the aim of providing a forum for scholarly research treating Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno as a thinker of deep contemporary relevance, indeed, importance. Our contention was, and continues to be, that the theoretical rigor and interdisciplinary scope that characterizes Adorno's output makes his work an essential resource for formulating a critical understanding of and plausible response to late capitalism and the broadly neo-liberal framework that currently dominates the globe.

Political Theory, 1997

Telos, 2011

There is a perennial problem affecting Adorno's philosophy. It seems to lack the resources to account for the normativity it contains. In an influential article, Finlayson has analyzed this problem and offered an intriguing solution to it. 1 According to Finlayson, Adorno subscribes to a normative ethics, but this normative commitment is in tension with his view that we cannot know the good or any positive values (in short, with his negativism). Finlayson argues that by drawing only on resources within Adorno's philosophy, it is, however, possible to provide access to a kind of good which is suitable as a normative basis for his ethics (namely, the good involved in the experiences of having ineffable insights), and this is the best way to resolve the tension between Adorno's normative commitment and his negativism. In this paper, I show that this proposal is unsuitable as (1) a normative basis of Adorno's ethics and also as (2) an explanation of the possibility of people acting according to this ethics. I end by outlining an alternative solution and by defending it against Finlayson's objections. II. Finlayson 's reconstruction of Adorno's ethics According to Finlayson, Adorno subscribes to an "ethics of resistance." 2 This ethics is a normative ethics insofar as it tells us how we should live in the late capitalist social world. It also provides a rationale for why we should live in the way it requires us to live. This rationale takes the form of a "new categorical imperative", which demands of us to arrange our "thoughts and actions so that Auschwitz will not repeat itself." 3 In particular, this involves the requirement to resist the social * Among those who have commented and criticized earlier drafts of this paper, I would especially like to thank J.G.